


An afterglow for you

by sabrina_il (marina)



Category: Hanna (2011)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 16:32:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/297833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marina/pseuds/sabrina_il
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A few moments Erik's shared with the women in his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An afterglow for you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Addison R (beyond_belief)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beyond_belief/gifts).



**1\. Johanna**

The waiting room is brightly lit, full of cheap brown chairs and women of all ages. Erik scans the room, evaluating. He'll pick one today, just one, and she'll say yes and do exactly as he tells her. This will happen, he tells himself, because he's the best at what he does.

He rules out the women over thirty five as well as the ones under twenty. He doesn't have medical records on any of them, but he's always had a good eye for telling someone's age. He's looking for someone old enough to make her own decisions but not old enough to know better. Someone who doesn't want the baby, but doesn't stand to lose everything if she's forced to keep it. Because he isn't here to offer everything; he's here barely offering at all.

There's a girl by the window who glances at him curiously. He's been sitting in the corner for a while, but most of the women haven't made eye contact. They think he's an escort, here waiting for a sister or a girlfriend, and they've got other things on their minds. But the girl by the window, with the pink-green hair and the brown coat, she looks up from her book, studies him, goes back to reading. Her clothes look neither expensive nor worn out. They suit her. Modest, but well chosen. She looks a little old to be a university student, which is interesting, considering her body language is similar to that of a teenager. She's uncomfortable and probably nervous, of course, but it's more than that. It merits further investigation.

Erik walks over and takes the empty seat next to her, introduces himself and asks for her name.

 

 **2\. Marissa**

"You can't be serious," Erik says.

"Oh, but I am," Marissa says, leaning back in her chain as if she's in a conference room rather than an abandoned warehouse.

"What does this mean for the children? Some of them are nearly three years old, the families have been promised financial support--"

"The project's been terminated, not scaled back. They won't have to worry about supporting those kids much longer--"

Erik rises suddenly and the chair tumbles to the floor behind him. His hands are clenched. "So this is it," his voice is quiet, like the sounds dare not leave his throat. "You're going to make sure no one even knows any of this ever existed."

Marissa rolls her eyes at him. "Please, Erik, as if you didn't know this was coming. You knew the project was under review."

He begins pacing, trying to breathe through the pain in his chest. "You can't--you can't just--" His mind is filled with fragments, the sentences won't come. "What gives you the right--"

"The _right_?" Marissa's eyebrows shoot up past her hairline. "May I remind you, darling, you developed the asset recruitment guidelines all on your own. You've been one of our star operatives. Come on, Erik," she goes on, after a pause. "You're not new at this. You know how it goes."

Erik keeps quiet, avoids meeting her eyes.

"Unless," Marissa's tone changes, loses its casualness and slips right into deadly. "This is about that girl you've been running laps for." She pauses, stares at him like she can see inside his soul if she concentrates hard enough.

Erik finally finds his tongue, hands unclenching. "It's not about a girl, Marissa. These are real children, with real families who love them. Don't pretend we do this every day."

"No, we don't," she agrees. "But this was always a possibility. You've never had a weak stomach before, Erik, don't tell me you're getting sentimental in your old age."

"Of course not," Erik says, after a pause.

 

 **3\. Hanna**

The first six months in Finland are all about survival. Successfully evading the CIA through half of Europe isn't enough. Digging up every contact, every resource, every bit of research he can to find a safe location where he won't be traced isn't enough. He has to build a life here, out in the frozen forest. A house, a hearth, a school. He'll have to be a father and a teacher for the rest of his life. Some part of him, the mindless, animal instinct part, insists this is just a reprieve. A vacation from his real life. He'll settle here, raise a daughter and one day rejoin the world. If he's managed to get them this far, he'll manage to get them out of it, when the time is right.

The part of his brain that's used to absorbing reality without flinching, to calculating the odds no matter how dire, whispers this is a false assumption. Maybe he'll die here, eaten by a wild animal while hunting alone. Maybe he'll live long enough to get away from the wilderness, for Hanna to be grown and self sufficient, to no longer need him as a shield from Marissa and her ilk. But he won't get far after that. He'll be tapped out, away from the game for God knows how long, presumed dead by friends and relatives, hunted. He'll never have his old life back.

But that doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is giving the girl he helped bring into existence a fighting chance.

In the first few years he ventures out into the nearest village for books. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, classic works of fictions. He can make clothes and weapons, but he can't manufacture human culture from scratch, and he doesn't want to. He owes her an introduction to the world she'll one day inhabit.

He decides to raise Hanna bilingual, German and English. She'll be fluent in a dozen other languages but he doesn't want to encourage a mishmash in her head. She can't grow up relying on bits of Spanish and Arabic and Italian to fill in her sentences. He settles on German because it's his own mother tongue, the language her mother spoke, and because secretly, in the dreams he won't admit to, he can see himself renting a flat in the shadier neighborhoods of Berlin with his grown up daughter, taking her to music concerts and the theater, being just another middle class German family.

He chooses English because of Marissa, whose German was always atrocious. Because Hanna has to live and breathe English to beat Marissa and her bosses at their own game. Because one way or another, the CIA is never going to let them go.


End file.
